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In our emails, sent once or twice a week, you'll receive:
• alerts on new threats to Pennsylvania's environment
• opportunities to join other Pennsylvanians on urgent actions
• updates on the decisions that impact our environment
• resources to help you create a cleaner, greener future

Clean Water for Pennsylvania

When it comes to our streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands, they all deserve protection. Period. That's why we're working to defend the Clean Water Act. With your support, we're urging senators to vote against any attempts to roll back the Clean Water Rule, which ensures the protection of more than 2 million miles of rivers and streams and the drinking water sources for one in three Americans.

We can’t turn back the clock on clean water

From the shores of Lake Erie to our iconic rivers like the Delaware, Susquehanna and Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers, Pennsylvania’s streams, rivers, lakes and other waters are where we go to swim, fish, canoe, kayak or just enjoy the scenery. They also supply millions of Pennsylvanians with clean drinking water.

However, far too often we’re reminded of the bad old days, when polluters used so many of Pennsylvania’s and America’s waters as their own private sewers:

In 2015, mutant bass with enormous cancerous growths were discovered in the Susquehanna River. The numerous toxins flowing into river are believed to be the cause, leading the PA Fish & Boat Commission to call for the river to be listed as seriously impaired.

Constant nitrates and other runoff pollution caused a massive algae bloom in Lake Erie in 2017. This bloom resulted in a large dead zone and shut down the drinking water supply for half a million people in 2014. The 2017 algae bloom was only slightly smaller.

In January 2014, a 10,000-gallon chemical spill into West Virginia’s Elk River left 300,000 people without water. They couldn’t drink it, bathe in it, shower with it, cook with it, or even wash the dishes with it.

Just six months later, in August 2014, a toxic algae bloom left 400,000 people in and around Toledo, Ohio, without drinking water. The algae contained cyanotoxin—a substance so potent that the military considered “weaponizing” it. Toledo faced problems again last year, when the algae bloom hit again.

We’ve worked hard to protect our waters and we’re doing all we can now to keep polluters from turning back the clock to the days when our rivers were so polluted that they caught on fire.

A growing threat for our waterways

Unfortunately, polluting industries have put our waters in even greater jeopardy. They’ve been pushing to weaken the U.S. Clean Water Act ever since it first passed nearly 50 years ago. After spending millions of dollars on lobbyists, lawyers, and glossy PR campaigns, they succeeded in carving out loopholes in the law that left more than half of America’s streams, and 50,000 miles of Pennsylvania streams, open to pollution.

As a result of these loopholes, hundreds of polluters were able to escape penalties.

Fortunately, the EPA agreed to act, proposing a new rule that would close the loopholes so the agency could enforce the law, stop the polluters, and protect our waterways.

"Legal warfare"

However, polluting industries lobbied furiously to stop us.

Our adversaries included big oil and gas companies, which have thousands of miles of pipelines running through wetlands. They threatened legal warfare against the plan to restore protections to these wetlands.

Coal companies, which have a history of dumping the wastes from their mining into mountain streams, and stood to benefit if the Clean Water Act failed to protect these streams.

Powerful developers who want to pave over wetlands without restrictions. A Michigan developer named Rapanos filed one of the court cases that created the loopholes.

Huge factory farms who generate millions of pounds of animal manure each year, some of which runs off into our water. These big agribusinesses and their congressional allies unleashed a smear campaign, designed to scare ordinary farmers into believing the EPA was out to grab their land and even “regulate puddles.” The smears were, of course, completely untrue.

Winning the biggest step forward for clean water in a decade

We quickly responded to support EPA’s efforts, to advocate in Congress for supporting this clean water initiative, recruit and mobilize a diverse and powerful coalition, and rally the grassroots to demand action.

Together with our allies, we gathered more than 800,000 comments and held more than half a million face-to-face conversations about the need to close loopholes in the Clean Water Act.

With the influential voices of more than 1,000 farmers, business owners and local elected officials behind us, our visibility events and media outreach efforts countered Big Ag’s smear campaign against the rule.

With the rule under threat, our national team held meetings with more than 50 congressional offices, urging them to champion the voice of the public and stand up for clean water.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy (sitting, right) and U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Army (Civil Works) Jo Ellen Darcy (sitting, left) signed the Clean Water for America rule on May 27, 2015, with Margie Alt, Environment America executive director (second from left).

But the fight for clean water continues

Sadly, now the Trump administration has come in and at the behest of the polluters has called for eliminating this historic clean water protection. "

Clean water is a right, not a privilege. So we’re ramping up our efforts again to defend our existing clean water safeguards to restore and protect our rivers and streams, and working to ensure clean water for all.

In anticipation of the scariest of holidays, PennEnvironment offered a list of the Top Ten Frightening Facts about Western Pennsylvania’s three rivers and their recommendations on ways to make next Halloween less “terrifying” for the Allegheny, Ohio and Monongahela Rivers and Pennsylvania’s other waterways.

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Related Campaign:
Get The Lead Out

Our children need safe drinking water — especially at school where they go to learn and play each day. Unfortunately, lead is contaminating drinking water at schools and pre-schools across the country. That’s why we’re working to Get the Lead Out.